Reviews
[Review] ‘Anthem’ is a Messy MMO Shooter That’s Still Satisfying to Play
Does Bioware’s loot-shootin‘ baby deliver on its Iron Man power fantasy? Our Anthem review tells you how its technical flaws are softened by its stellar combat and flying.
I like Anthem much more than the 3.5 Skulls out of 5 I’m going to give it at the bottom of this review may suggest. On a 1-10 scale, that’s a 7, which— as someone who reads and writes a lot of game reviews— I know suggests a pretty average, maybe mediocre, experience. That’s not how I feel about Anthem.
BioWare’s rootin’, tootin’, lootin’, shootin’ answer to Destiny is a triumph of game feel. While the famed RPG developer has historically been known for gripping, choice-driven narratives that feel pretty meh to play, with Anthem, the teams at BioWare have outdone themselves, delivering an exhilarating roller-coaster ride of soaring and shooting. Minute-to-minute, Anthem feels as good as an Iron Man-simulator should feel.
And you are this particular Iron Man or Woman, the pilot of a fully customizable flying exosuit, and a gun for hire (known here as a “freelancer”) helping to keep safe the citizens who call the game’s hub world, Fort Tarsis, home. Most of your time in-game will be spent beyond the walls of the fort, taking on missions, contracts, and strongholds in the lush green world of Bastion.
I never got tired of exploring Anthem’s world. Taking to the skies is simple and intuitive, and the javelin’s tendency to overheat pushes you to look for outcroppings to run along and waterfalls to fly beneath. When your health ticks down into the red, flight also provide for exciting escapes. When the big bad Dominion’s forces are overwhelming, ejecting to the sky above the battle’s fray provides all the functionality of getting into cover, but without slowing the frantic pace. From this vantage point, you can switch from flying to hovering, firing down at enemies’ weak spots from beyond their grasp.
And, the shooting, from whatever angle, feels extremely good. After plenty of time playing Fortnite, it’s refreshing to hop into an online third-person shooter that feels tactile and crunchy to play. While Anthem’s roster of weapons is severely limited when compared with other shared world shooters like Destiny, the firearms that currently occupy the armory are all fun to use. Shotguns, assault rifles, snipers and pistols all have a satisfying punchiness.
That shooting is supplemented by javelin-specific abilities. Over the course of Anthem’s campaign, you’ll have the opportunity to unlock four different javelin classes. The Ranger is a sturdy all-arounder; a base model javelin to learn the basics with (who, not coincidentally, you’ll inhabit for the tutorial mission). My favorite, the Interceptor, is swift death, melee-oriented greased lightning that unleashes a flurry of blows for its Ultimate ability. The mighty Colossus is slow-moving but powerful, with a lengthy health bar and a physical shield it can heft to hold off enemy attacks. And the Storm is a mage-like mech with the ability to summon elemental attacks, raining down lightning, fire, and ice on any opponent foolish enough to get in its way. Each suit feels significantly different, and the fact that one player can unlock all four—rather than having to start the campaign over as a different class—makes it easy to experiment and find the right fit.
Combat and flight— frequently nestled together as snugly as a freelancer in their metal death suit—form the beating heart of Anthem. Unfortunately, BioWare doesn’t do nearly enough to vary the activities you use these verbs to accomplish. Probably 90 percent of the missions in Anthem follow a nearly identical formula: fly to a location, fight a ton of enemies who are almost always arranged in an arena-style circle around you, then collect the loot that the big ones drop at the end of the fight. There are variations—gather some items while you fight the enemies; fight the enemies then move to a different area and fight some more enemies—but, by and large, Anthem relies on the same structure over and over again.
Watch Neill Blomkamp’s Anthem short film
As a result, I forgot most of Anthem’s missions the second they ended. Some, like the first and final missions of the campaign, drop you in unique settings, which provides a welcome change. But, most are memorable, not because of anything that happens on the sortie, but rather, because of the story beats that bookend them.
Generally, that story—communicated through buzzy voices in your headset during missions, and through first-person cut scenes back at the fort—worked for me. There are problems—it relies overmuch on the player’s codex to explain the backgrounds behind all the Proper Nouns it evokes; the player character is less malleable than past BioWare protagonists, and about as interesting as a silent protagonist; your choices are effectively meaningless—but, generally, it does a solid job of telling an epic science fantasy story with a cast of characters that I mostly liked. While the overarching story is sometimes hard to follow, I found it easy to get invested in the personal drama.
But, no matter how much I like what Anthem is doing, plentiful bugs still seem to be keeping many players from experiencing it. The problems that hamstrung the game’s demo—defined mostly by server issues which rendered it unplayable for many players—have mostly been resolved. But, they left new issues in their wake. One of the random players I tackled the second-to-last mission with said that he had attempted it three times prior but had been unable to progress because of glitches. Sure enough, during our run, we encountered a bug that prevented the mission from loading correctly, resulting in the game sending endless (genuinely endless) waves of enemies at us without offering a way to progress. I started experimenting because I didn’t want to replay the lengthy mission from the beginning, and found that if I let myself die, it reloaded our squad into the mission at the right point. This moment was satisfying; not because the game was working correctly, but because I was able to overcome the game’s brokenness.
My hope is that BioWare, too, will be able to overcome the ways that their game is broken. Since that demo, Anthem has steadily grown more stable. Some issues, though—like the repetitive mission structure—run deeper than glitchiness. But, Anthem’s core mechanics are satisfying, its world is enticing and its characters, by and large, are charming. With this review done, I will continue to play it. I want Anthem to get better, and I only hope that EA will give BioWare the time and resources to make this game as good as it can be.
As it stands, it’s still worth a shot.
Anthem review code for PC provided by the publisher.
Anthem is out now on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
Reviews
‘Hungry’ Review – Finally, a Film Brave Enough to Call Out Hippos for the Monsters They Truly Are
When it comes to the animal attack subgenre of horror, there’s a hierarchy of sorts with the wildlife in question. Killer shark movies are easily the most ubiquitous, while alligators/crocodiles, dogs, bears, and snakes probably lead the rest of the pack.
It’s often worth paying attention, though, when a filmmaker targets a more atypical animal threat, including the likes of Jonathan King’s Black Sheep or Juan Piquer Simón’s Slugs. A new contender rumbles its way onto the screen this month, and while we all grew up thinking hippos are rotund cuties, the truth is far more frightening – this hippo is Hungry.
Sistine (Madison Davenport) and her best friend, Hannah (Olivia Bernstone), are enjoying a vacation in New Orleans, hoping to drown out their troubles back home. They sign up for an early morning bayou tour known for its alligator sightings and are joined by four other tourists and the boat’s skipper, Rodrigo (Michel Curiel). An uneventful trip sees Rodrigo take the group off the beaten path, but when an animal in the water capsizes their boat, the group finds themselves trapped in the swamp by something unexpected and deadly.
It’s a hippo. There’s a hippo in the bayou, and it’s not happy about all these pesky people.
From Joy Houck’s Creature from Black Lake to Walter Hill’s Southern Comfort to Adam Green’s Hatchet, the movies have warned us time and again not to go into the swampy bayous of Louisiana. Those cautionary tales are appreciated, though, as bigfoot, inbred hicks, and undead serial killers are a very real threat. But hippos? In the bayou? Well, that just seems silly.
And yet, Hungry plays its blubbery, big-toothed threat with deadly seriousness, and it’s all the better for it. “But Rob,” I can already hear some of you saying, “just yesterday you reviewed the new shark attack film, Chum, and said it suffered from taking itself too seriously. What gives?” For one thing, you’re misquoting me, but more importantly, the reference there was more of an observation on the animal attack subgenre successes as a whole. The “fun” ones tend to succeed more often than their more serious counterparts, but a dramatic and thrilling time can still be found with filmmakers who know what they’re doing.
Chum may be serious, but it’s also poorly written/performed, lacking in any degree of tension, devoid of personality, and so on. By contrast, Hungry lets its suspense build on the backs of engaging characters, good performances, and believable writing. Only one of its ensemble is obnoxious – a major feat for this kind of film – but even then, their motivations are both well-written and understandable.
The rest of the characters are people you’d be happy to see survive the night, and rather than looking forward to the next kill, director James Nunn and his cast leave us uncertain and nervous about who’s going to go belly up. The nervous business traveler wanting to get back to her kids? The family of three celebrating lost loved ones while on their vacation? Joaquim de Almeida’s Walker, an old hunter, is introduced saying, “The only cute hippo is a dead hippo,” so you pretty much know where he’ll end up.
To that end, the film teases out its hippo’s first appearance until well into the ninety-minute running time. We get ripples and splashes, but it’s only around the midway point that we get our first real look at the beast, and it looks fantastic. Nunn goes on to show the hippo in all its glory, and it’s a convincing antagonist brought to life through practical prosthetic effects and digital work. From the ear twitches to the beast’s giant maw opening wide with awe and malice, the hippo’s presence feels part of the action. There’s a tangible nature to it, something practical effects excel at while digital effects sometimes fail to convince of, and both succeed here with quality work from all involved.
While we get brief exteriors early on and some visually appealing drone shots, the bulk of the film unfolds on what looks to be a highly believable, set-dressed water tank (but could very well be an actual location, in which case, kudos to the team). It’s wholly convincing as a section of the bayou, complete with shoulder-high water and arching, twisting trees emerging into the sky. The film was shot in Malta, which is, coincidentally, where Chum was filmed as well.
Nunn, who also wrote Hungry, is now ten films deep into a fairly interesting career as a genre filmmaker. He’s made four movies with Scott Adkins, three of which are certified action bangers (with 2016’s Eliminators in particular being an underrated gem). He dipped a toe into the animal attack subgenre back in 2022 with the aforementioned Shark Bait, and it’s clear he learned some lessons from that endeavor, as its first hour is an engaging, attractively shot feature that sinks fast as soon as its poorly rendered shark becomes a lead character. Hungry improves on every aspect of that film, with its biggest step up being in regard to the effects.
If there’s an area or two where Hungry lacks bite, it’s in both its gore and its ending. There are numerous kills here, but the nature of the attacks and the choices made by Nunn mean none of them result in gory assaults or outcomes. We’re shown the torn apart corpse of an alligator early on, but most of the human kills see them attacked and dragged underwater, leaving nothing but a blood spill behind. Similarly, while the ending encounter satisfies, it still feels like it should have been a bigger confrontation. Neither of these aspects really hurt the film, but a bolstering of the gore and ending antics would have definitely upped the film’s ultimate entertainment value and rewatchability.
When all is said and done, Hungry is a genuinely solid animal attack film that succeeds in making its creature threat thrilling, entertaining, and, dare I say, educational? Title notwithstanding, the film acknowledges that hippos are vegetarians, meaning the five hundred or so people they kill every year – a true fact! – are slaughtered not out of hunger, but out of spite, self-defense, or a desire to play “land orca” while tossing around us fragile humans like we’re little more than seals in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Characters are grounded and engaging, the film moves well between suspense, character beats, and action, and the effects used to bring the hippo to life are highly effective and never feel like distractions. Drop those expectations of a Hungry Hungry Hippo romp, and settle in for a terrific little survival thriller about an angry, angry hippo instead.
Chomp chomp.
Hungry releases in select theaters today, June 3, before arriving on VOD on June 23, 2026.
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